You open your email, read a message, mark it as unread, move on to the next, read it, delete it, read the next, mark it as unread… what a mess.

I’m experimenting with flagging messages in my mailbox rather than leaving them as unread. After a half-week of this, the result is a half-dozen flagged messages that I need to follow up on. One problem with this is that they look lower priority to me than the unread messages that come in on top of them. Another problem is that neither my BlackBerry nor my iPhone support flagging. This approach seems like a nightmare to try to maintain on as many machines as I use on a daily basis.

Perhaps it would help to create a few more smart mailboxes (unread, action, etc.) and start using more viewer windows (one per smart mailbox) to get more focused on the different buckets. Not sure that’s any better than the AppleScript approach for maintainability though.